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Carry us to Aquarius
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“Forty years later, like 40 years in the desert, and then a rebirth—that’s exactly what it felt like.” Veteran psych-folk figure Djin Aquarian is reflecting on the cosmic, Kabbalistic significance of Barack Obama’s victory party in Chicago’s Grant Park, where in 1968, as the Democratic National Convention went down nearby, police rioted and brutalized anti-war protesters. At the time, Aquarian was a copy boy at the Chicago Daily News—“I witnessed reporters and photographers coming in having been beaten by cops, and cameras having been smashed.” Four decades later and the American right wing lies shattered while Obama—whose given name is derived from the Hebrew for “blessing”—stands triumphant. “I rushed down there at 11 o’clock at night and got to join in the end of the ceremony, and felt very special to have been in Chicago, my hometown, which was another full circle for me. I left Chicago right after those conventions to seek my fortune in Hollywood as a songwriter, and never considered Chicago my home again. This coming back around now, and having so much great acceptance from so many people that have loved the Ya Ho Wa 13 music over several generations, is another great full circle in my whole epic journey.” Ya Ho what? If the band name doesn’t ring a bell—or bang a gong, more precisely—then know that it’s one of several, alongside Children of the Sixth Root Race and the Savage Sons of Yahowha, assigned to the “house band” of the Source. Led by a guru named Father Yod, the Source was a Los Angeles-based “family” (fine, call it a cult if you like) of dozens of hippie freaks hopped up on Hebrew mysticism, health food, high times and home-brewed psychedelic sounds, of which they produced 65 albums’ worth. Gong show“Father Yod, he was like Mister Expansion,” Aquarian recalls today. “He wanted more out of you than you even knew you had in you. He was a Marine rehabilitation sergeant in WWII, so he knew how to get anything he wanted out of you. Because we recognized his mastery in so many realms, we submitted ourselves to his tutorship.” For Aquarian, who’d been crafting bubblegum pop and jingles strictly by the book, Father Yod’s guidance led to a complete inversion—music as a wild, intuitive, unplanned and in-the-moment experience, what the guru called the Penetration sound. “He was asking for more intensity than I could come up with in the normal way of playing. I played in open tunings which I made for myself, that I understood in my way and sounded good to me. I still do, because that’s how I get into this Penetration sound, that’s how it came about—that and Father’s gong and kettle drum playing, which were so primal, carried so much infusing vibration. “He used to play that gigantic gong for us during morning meditation and get all sorts of harmonic crescendos going, and we’d astral travel as a group. Sometimes he’d play so intensely, you almost felt you wanted to get up and run from the vibration, but you didn’t dare. You endured and just lay there and—you know that scene at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey? You’re just shooting through the stars and they hyper-dimensionalize like a many-microgram trip. He’d just take you away.” Number 9 and number 11The Penetration sound pierced the music world again in 2008 with Drag City’s anthology Songs From the Source, but Aquarian has sustained Father Yod’s teachings all along, including the fiendish obsession with rabbinical numerology and metaphysical matrices. “It’s like a software program that you can put into your bio-computer and all of the sudden, your mind starts operating on a different dimensional frequency. The correspondences between that which is within and that which is without, using numbers and symbols and shapes and philosophical concepts that go with each Hebrew letter, create a firmament in the portions of your brain other than those we use in our daily thinking about the weights and measures of the material plane. Once that starts to sink in and assimilate, you actually have access to extrasensory perception of sorts. Anyone can learn it, that’s the beauty of it—I’m not trying to brag or say I’m special—and it’s teachable.” Aquarian and friends opened the YHWH House school in Mt. Shasta, CA in September, 2001—“prophesied in the Great Pyramid,” his Web site attests, as the true dawn of the Age of Aquarius. Uh, given the events of that month, that seems kinda counterintuitive. “Well, most birth is preceded by something people perceive as pain,” he chuckles. “Six days after that, the Source family gather as we had planned, and I was on the first flight allowed out of San Francisco going east. I hopped on it and it definitely felt prophetic in the cosmic sense. Something was being born out of this fire and blood of birth.” WITH PLASTIC CRIMEWAVE SOUND |
